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Anyway, the verdict appears to be against lettin' the Garveys in, and we had about as much to do with it as we did about fixin' the price of coal, or endin' the sugar shortage. Yet here when we try to do one of 'em a good turn we get the cold eye. "Next time," says I, "we'll remember we are strangers, and not give her an openin' to throw it at us."
But it's kind of a jolt to find that Mrs. Garvey is sore on us for all this. "Where does she get that stuff?" I asks Vee, after we get home. "Who's been telling her we handle the social blacklist for the Roaring Rock district of Long Island?" "I suppose she thinks we have done our share, or failed to do it," says Vee. "And perhaps we have. I'm rather sorry for the Garveys.
At which she proceeds to state an alibi which sounds reasonable enough. She'd rather understood that the Garveys didn't expect to be called on. Maybe you know how it is in one of these near-swell suburbs! Not that there's any reg'lar committee to pass on newcomers. Some are taken in right off, some after a while, and some are just left out.
Garvey ain't so enthusiastic. She warms up about as much as a cold storage turkey. You can't feaze Vee, though, when she starts in to be folksy. "I'm just so sorry we've been so long getting over," says she. "And we came near not coming in this time. Didn't we hear music a moment ago. You're not having a dance or or anything, are you?" The Garveys look at each other sort of foolish for a second.
Anyway, that's how it seems to work out here in Harbor Hills. I don't know who it was first passed around the word, or where we got it from, but we'd been tipped off somehow that the Garveys didn't belong. I don't expect either of us asked for details. Whether or not they did wasn't up to us. But everybody seems to take it that they don't, and act accordin'. Plenty of others had met the same deal.
But, as a matter of fact, stated confidential and on the side, it was the little lady herself who pushed the starter button in this affair with the Garveys. If she hadn't I don't see where it would ever have got going. Let's see, it must have been early in November.
When the Garveys became possessed of so many dollars that they faltered in computing them, the deficiencies of life on Blackjack began to grow prominent.
Have you take me for an evening call on the Garveys." "Gosh!" says I. "You're some little Polar explorer, ain't you?" It was no idle threat of Vee's. A few nights later we got under way right after dinner and drove over there. I expect we were about the first outsiders to push the bell button since they moved in. But we'd no sooner rung than Vee begins to hedge.
Some quit after the first six months, others stuck it out. As for the Garveys, they'd appeared from nowhere in particular, bought this big square stucco house on the Shore road, rolled around in their showy limousine, subscribed liberal to all the local drives and charity funds, and made several stabs at bein' folksy. But there's no response.
Later on, they offered the Garveys an enormous quantity of ready, green, crisp money for their thirty-acre patch of cleared land, mentioning, as an excuse for such a mad action, some irrelevant and inadequate nonsense about a bed of mica underlying the said property.
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